O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (2000) *** The Coen brothers allegorical tale of how prototype rock 'n' roll defeated the Ku Klux Klan on the field of politics, thereby saving much of the best America from some of the worst. Well, actually, in a dynamic document of such grandiose expectations that could only be a small part of the story, but a central thread or two I think. Very loosely based-and I mean very loosely-on Homer's The Odyssey, it does appear that 1930s America was positively littered with large and unusual social groups wandering around the forest singing. There is also a blind fortune teller (and it strikes me that a key to all of this fortune telling business is not to have your fortune told too many times, a theme I shall develop elsewhere), and a terrifying cyclops. But I think I've already said too much, as I've said a lot and there's no way to begin to say enough. Until the climactic scenes, my mind did occasionally return to the indictment that the film seemed something less than its well-considered parts. In pseudo-surrealism it's difficult to blame anything for being too credible or not credible enough, but I would have hoped that George Clooney and John Turturrow would have been much more-or way way less-credible as criminals of the bumpkin family. John Goodman works better for me, and Michael Badalucco probably couldn't have been more perfect. Witty moments throughout, as our lumpen-epic heroes wander about collecting and abandoning clever plot lines (that really need not have been developed anyway, it's the volume that starts getting you, I think), and no hope of an explosively revelatory conclusion will be orphaned.
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